Hewlett Packard today unveiled the next generation of its for data center automation and management. The mantra with the latest release: IT can deliver services on a massive scale, faster than ever before.

Primarily known as a hardware vendor, HP is now aiming to provide a broader range of software and management solutions, as the role of IT managers evolves from simply providing network support to driving business growth.

Indeed, today's IT managers find themselves in the throes of an evolution as social networking, mobility, big data, and cloud services are changing the way we do business. More than ever, C-level execs are relying on their IT teams to turn raw data into actionable information that can make or break their business.

HP says it wants to help companies deliver services and application releases faster by streamlining the management of complex distributed systems and heterogeneous environments.

Putting Out Fires

Commenting on the benefits of HP's new IT automation solutions, Andy Smith, VP of Application Hosting Services at McKesson, explains: "Our IT employees were bogged down being enterprise 'fire fighters' instead of proactive business partners.

McKesson is America's oldest and largest healthcare services company, providing pharmaceuticals and medical supplies as well as information technologies to customers in every segment of the healthcare industry.

Smith says HP's cloud and automation software has enabled his company to improve its IT operations by automating routine, repetitive tasks that are prone to human error. Now, instead of being bogged down with rote IT tasks, employees can focus more developing and providing innovative IT services.

The result: McKesson can now deliver both Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) in under an hour. The firm also reports it has reduced IT service outages by 78 percent and reduced the occurrence of critical IT incidents by 65 percent. In addition, McKesson reports that it has been able to deploy 40 percent more IT systems.

That sort of boost makes McKesson the poster child for the launch of HP's next generation of software and services that help automate the complete lifecycle of IT services, from routine data center maintenance to the delivery of business processes.

Inside the Suite

HP is offering a number of new solutions, including HP OO 10, HP SA 10, HP DMA 10, and HP Cloud Service Automation 3.2. Pricing and will be available individually worldwide, directly from HP or through its channel partners.

HP OO 10 works to reduce the time needed to build and deploy business processes, either on premises or via the cloud. The time needed goes from weeks to minutes by automating all application and infrastructure runbooks. HP OO 10 offers out-of-the-box support for more than 5,000 IT operations, including new support for Amazon S3 Storage, HP ArcSight, HP Fortify, OpenStack and SAP applications.

The HP SA 10 enterprise-grade server life cycle management platform helps IT manage more than 100,000 physical and virtual servers from a single pane of glass to eliminate management complexity. According to HP, it also improves operational economics by reducing the administrator-to-server ratio by up to 60 percent.